Opposition as principle of structuring and interpreting a literary text

The article considers a text of verbal art from the perspectives of linguo-stylistics and linguo-didactics. Teaching reading is the underlying condition in language education, including teaching foreign languages. Reading literary texts both in the original and in an abridged form forms cultural maturity, and contributes to increasing language competence. Evaluation of its linguistic properties and artistic message is determined by understanding basic mechanisms of its structuring, namely, opposition. The author analyzes this principle of structuring a literary text as a research method on the example of English language novels written by E. Litman (‘The Last Chicken in America’ и ‘Mannequin Girl’) which belong to the category of contact, or translingual literature. Description of text structure through the set of dichotomies is the interpretation mechanism applicable to teaching practice.